William Wordsworth Quotes

And stepping westward seemed to be A kind of heavenly destiny.

Sad fancies do we then affect, In luxury of disrespect To our own prodigal excess Of too familiar happiness.

Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour.

If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure,
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man, whose eye
Is ever on himself, doth look on one,
The least of nature's works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. O, be wiser thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love,
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.

O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you think,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free.

Drink, pretty creature, drink!

Those old credulities, to Nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of history?

That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth all together, if it moves at all.

...and in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart, and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes.

That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.

Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!

Ocean is a mighty harmonist.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules, Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought More for mankind at this unhappy day Then all the pride of intellect and thought?